This fluffy life sim aims to be Animal Crossing for PC gamers

In April, PuffPals: Island Skies launched a Kickstarter and raised over $2.5m to create a cute life sim game where you make animal friends, build a farm, and decorate your house. With its colorful aesthetic and stubby little characters, it looks like Animal Crossing, except it won't be tied to a Nintendo platform when its eventually out.

PuffPals: Island Skies is set on a floating chunks of earth that have tons of room for you to build your farm on. There's a bunch of animal friends up there, like a raccoon and a chicken that sells bread. In the trailer at Wholesome Direct, we see what look like little quests that you can do for prospective animal pals to build a relationship with them.

There are also a ton of ways to customize your sky island. The trailer shows off the ability to move and place furniture in your home as well as organize your farm (and grow the cutest carrot you've ever seen). It's not quite clear if you get to choose a specific island to call home or if you get to travel to others over the course of the game.

The character customization looks much more robust than Animal Crossing, too. There are a variety of hairstyle options and clothing to choose from—maybe there will be hats and other accessories to unlock later.

PuffPals: Island Skies doesn't have an exact release date, but its Kickstarter rewards suggest that it'll be out sometime in 2023.

Associate Editor

Tyler has covered games, games culture, and hardware for over a decade before joining PC Gamer as Associate Editor. He's done in-depth reporting on communities and games as well as criticism for sites like Polygon, Wired, and Waypoint. He's interested in the weird and the fascinating when it comes to games, spending time probing for stories and talking to the people involved. Tyler loves sinking into games like Final Fantasy 14, Overwatch, and Dark Souls to see what makes them tick and pluck out the parts worth talking about. His goal is to talk about games the way they are: broken, beautiful, and bizarre.